Nothing Still about Still Lifes: Masterpieces from the World of Flowers Collection
Deji Art Museum
Nanjing
Aug 2023–ongoing

I have never much liked pansies. The name derives from the French pensée, “thought,” the flower said to resemble a face deep in contemplation; to me it has always looked simian and  squashed, like a scowl. But at the Deji Art Museum in Nanjing, I find myself transfixed by Georgette Chen’s Pansies (c. 1940s), painted in diluted earth tones during the years she and her husband Eugene lived under house arrest in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. He would die there in 1944, before the end of the war. Chen’s pansies are a pale, almost chalky pink, their gray-green branches void of lushness. Two pots, one raised above the other, form an entwined triangular mass with cascading petal clusters. Light settles on a central blossom whose stalk has begun to bend under its weight; it strains, resolutely, to raise its head. 

Chen’s quietly affecting Pansies sit in formidable company. “Nothing Still about Still Lifes” gathers some 140 works by 109 artists: Impressionist and modernist masters Monet, Renoir, and Cézanne through Matisse and Braque and Picasso, contemporary heavyweights Andy Warhol, David Hockney, and Georgia O’Keeffe; Asian titans Wu Dayu, Wu Guanzhong, Sanyu, Zao Wou-Ki, and Chu Teh-Chun; and a cohort of academic painters from Nanjing’s vigorous artistic milieu of the late 1920s and ’30s. The Deji Group, a Nanjing-based property and retail conglomerate, amassed its ambitious “World of Flowers” collection over a decade within a considerably longer collecting history that began with ancient Chinese art. First unveiled in 2023, the sprawling floral-themed assemblage has since become the museum’s flagship permanent display, periodically rehung and expanded as new works enter the fold. 

An exhibition built entirely around flowers courts a certain quaintness as well as brazenness; the subject is, after all, among the most over-interpreted motifs in art history. When the Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted “Objects of Desire: The Modern Still Life” in 1997, bringing together 131 works by 71 artists, critics were divided: Roberta Smith wrote that it was “infused with a sense of redundancy,” resembling “a condensed version of the show’s own permanent collection,” while John Haber found it more rewarding than advertised. In 2022, the Louvre’s “Things: A History of Still Life” in Paris, which featured 170 works spanning prehistory to the present and drew loans from more than 70 institutions and private collections, was hailed as exceptional and daring, if “a little indigestible” in its sheer density, per Mark Kidel. Deji attempts something arguably bolder: it uses a single patron’s private holdings to sketch the first large-scale cross-cultural genealogy of the still life, placing Asian and Western modernisms in direct dialogue. 

The hang is pointedly non-chronological, its geography porous. In the first hall, titled “Cross-Pollination,” Jeff Koons’s towering Pink Ballerina (2009–21), adorned with fresh-cut red carnations, looms mid-pirouette amid lavish bouquets by Monet (roses nestled against fluffy clouds of baby’s breath, 1878), Picasso (a brooding Blue Period arrangement, 1901, and a Rose Period tableau, 1904), Matisse (vibrant rose blooms presiding over an interior in Nice, 1920), and Suzanne Valadon, the first woman painter admitted to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1894 (a radiant posy against mustard curtains, 1930). Adjacent, a salon-style wall places Wayne Thiebaud (1920–2021) beside Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) beneath Wang Yachen (1894–1983); works by Zenzaburō Kojima (1893–1962), Guan Liang (1900–1986), and Bernard Buffet (1928–1999) join the same congregation. The section as a whole announces the exhibition’s concern with the circulation of artists and styles between East Asia and the West, recording the experiments and achievements of Chinese painters who spent formative years abroad, often in Paris. Within that exchange, Wu Dayu (1903–1988), Sanyu (1901–1966), and Zao Wou-Ki (1920–2013) emerge as engines of pioneering new vernaculars with abstract brushwork, gestural yet pared-down lines, and incandescent palettes. 

Grounded in research drawing from trade routes, botany, and species migration in addition to art history, the exhibition offers a digital guide that allows visitors to reference the exact species against the paintings. The rigor of the research is most tangible in Renoir’s Fleurs dans un Vase (1878), shown alongside the actual majolica vase depicted in the canvas that the artist kept in his studio and reused across several still lifes. The curatorial logic grows more associative as the sections progress, but the paintings keep earning their wall space. “Avant-Gardening” nods to the history of garden fashions and teems with preening bouquets. Among handsome pictures by Manet, Cézanne, and Pissarro, I particularly enjoyed a soft, pastel-hued 1876 Gauguin vase poised on sheet music, as well as a solitary 1909 chrysanthemum by Mondrian (whose paintings of flowers in fact outnumber his austere abstractions). Later, in an ensemble of tranquil canvases by Nanjing artists, I was taken by Lü Sibai’s lavender tray of pink chrysanthemums that sat coyly on the ground, in the shade, out of the sun (1948).

Some of the show’s strongest moments surfaced with flower works by masters not known for the genre. The chapters that follow, “Meta-Flowers” and “Breakout Blooms,” turn up an early interior with a potted siam tulip by Willem de Kooning (1929), an ascetic bouquet by Alberto Giacometti (1963–64), and a rare petite Giorgio Morandi floral still life (c. 1958). In the last hall, a 1986 Zhang Xiaogang figure crowned by an exaggerated yet graceful floral turban is paired exquisitely with a luminescent Francis Picabia silene laid over a translucent visage (1930–31).

The collection remains a work in progress, its trophy pieces multiplying as acquisitions of contemporary work continue apace—growth that, for a formalist, may expose a friction between two titles: a “World of Flowers” housed inside a show named “Nothing Still about Still Lifes.” By the exhibition’s finale, flowers have run amok, slipping the leash of the genre. Christopher Wool’s roller-painted floral patterns (1987), Yayoi Kusama’s polka-dotted camellia (2008), and Koons’sWall Relief with Bird (1991), from his notorious Made in Heaven series (1989–91), ask a category built on realism and transience to carry abstraction, appropriation, insinuation, and irony. Is one looking at still life, or the flower conscripted as motif? If modernism has wrung this philosophically loaded, technically exacting aesthetic for spectacle and pure form, what is still left of it? The still life is, after all, nature morte—dead nature. Has the genre died too? 

The exhibition poses these questions to itself as much as to its audience. At one level, it confirms Fredric Jameson’s postmodern “crisis of historicity,” the past surviving only as “a vast collection of images, a multitudinous photographic simulacrum.” At the same time, the hang is most potent where it resembles not Jameson’s graveyard but Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogized heteroglossia: distinct voices, none in charge, calling and answering across eras and geographies. Closer to a Deleuzo-Guattarian rhizome than a tree of influence, it resists taxonomy, enacting a sustained cultivation—not an archive of masterpieces past but a living organism that keeps self-propagating, each rehang changing how the pictures are seen and heard.

I return in the dead of night, taking advantage of Deji being the only museum in the world that opens daily until midnight. In the heightened hush, I linger among the cobalt folds of Tamara de Lempicka’s Bouquet d’Hortensias et Citron (c. 1922); delight in Lê Phổ’s sprightly blooms, mirrored by the spirited patterns of an accompanying tea cloth (1956); and resist the urge to touch the monochrome linen beneath Li Ruinian’s peonies (1982). I also return, again and again, to Chen’s unassuming yet insistent Pansies; I decide that I do like pansies now. The exhibition’s radicality lies in each work’s fidelity to silence, in the research and curatorial teams’ dedication and care, and in the attention of each viewer, who might be changed by their looking. The philosopher Byung-Chul Han, writing on gardening as meditation, speaks of “a lingering in stillness.” As long as still life can still arrest us before a sliver of history and press us into the labor of pensée, its work continues, and we are left to decide for ourselves what still feels alive.

Michele Chan is managing editor at ArtAsiaPacific.